If Asian carp were crappie

Ky Lake would be walking in tall cotton right now. The bays and especially the creek channels in them are absolutely cram packed with the stupid things. I scanned about a half mile section in Blood River today that was carp from one end to the other. Every bay that I looked in was a repeat.

I suspect they're crammed in there taking advantage of the lower current levels. There are wakes trailing behind the river channel markers right now.

I think we're in for a long, hard month or so before anything gets any better.

I'm scared to think just where these lakes might be in 5 years. A fishing buddy of mine caught two or three asian carp last week with a crappie jig that they absolutely inhaled. It's scary where we are headed with these things.

I hung into one today too when I was picking a rod up to change jigs. I'm sure I snagged it but it was a heck of a tug for about 2 seconds before the hook straightened out.

Quackrstakr, Thanks for the post. I agree, I guess KY and Barkley lakes will soon be the Asian Carp capital of the US. Come here to get your carp. If someone now with the DNR would honestly give us the % of weight per species in the Lake now, it would be BAD, just my opinion. I don't think Crappie mass weights are within 3-5% of the weight of all the Carp in both lakes. I think this problem will continue to get worse with no near term solution and I truly believe the two lakes will be majority 'Carp' Lakes. I'm sure you will catch other fish but it will always be a pain to deal with the Carp.

It's a much bigger problem than TWRA wants to discuss, in my opinion.
Not only to our sport fishing, but to all the pleasure boaters as well.

The pleasure boaters will get the odd fish jumping in the boat when idling around but I don't foresee anyone getting taken out by a fish at speed unless they are following another boat closely. I have shot them with a bow for several years now both on the lakes and below the dams. When they get spooked from above in deeper water they generally go down instead of jumping. 6 feet or so or less is when they will start jumping out of the water from surface commotion, just from what I have seen. They are usually well behind the boat when they jump as well unless you are just putting around.

The sheer biomass that they are eating per day has to be wreaking havoc on the food chain. There are 2 types of the carp, the silver and the bighead. The silvers are the ones that jump. The bigheads get up well in excess of 50 pounds where the biggest silver I have seen is probably 20. But the thing to remember is that there are literal millions of them out there now. How much biomass does just one school of 50+ lb bigheads consume per day? Take that amount and multiply it exponentially.

It could become a little more dangerous to water ski. Those fish jump about the same distance behind the boat as the skier.